“You need backlinks and organic visitors searching for the answers, products, and services you provide. Guest blogging is the best way to do all that…” © Neil Patel.

Each SEO professional knows or should know that the hardest and the greatest part of the SEO process is to create decent content. No SEO tool will help here. Content will lead you through all SERP positions and become a business card of your website. However, you can’t get the highest positions immediately, because people don’t know about you at the beginning. In addition, your competitors already have their places and will not give you a crown for no reason at all. So, how do you make a website visible on the Internet and stand out in the crowd?

The answer is pretty simple and, at the same time, difficult enough: attract more people and increase traffic.

How can you do this? Create content of high quality and in detail. This will definitely attract visitors to your place.

Look at Google. Even though we are angry because of all those Algorithms, penalties, and rank drops, at the same time we are always ready to admit that Google seeks to algorithmically present its idea of quality and tries to give this quality to the users. This has brought Google a lot of customers.

How can other websites make their field of customers big enough and show that they have needed quality? What do webmasters try to do besides keyword research in order to get the highest positions on the SERPs? The most common answer: they do link building. It is hard but future success requires this.

And guest blogging for a long time has been one of those ideas which come to mind almost immediately when we talk about backlinks. Today we are going to focus on this.

Table of Contents

1. Get Started with Guest Blogging
2. Pros of Guest Blogging
3. Cons of Guest Blogging
4. How to Identify Your Target Audience
5. Where to Publish Guest Posts
6. How to Introduce Yourself for Guest Posting
7. How to Promote Your Guest Posts

Guest blogging is a great opportunity to show the audience of a well trafficked site with a high domain authority that you are worth their attention and they can bravely come to your website. People trust websites that are already quite authoritative and sometimes don’t want to miss any material they present. From those interested people you can get more traffic: they may share your post, advise their friends, and they may also come to your website looking for more good material. If they are satisfied with the stuff you provide, you can wait for backlinks, because great content is always worth sharing.

Here we encounter the quality content problem. Guest blogging is not just about interesting things you want to share with others; this is your business card for potential visitors. You should use all your talent and power and conduct a lot of research on a chosen topic to prove that you are competent enough for people to want to visit your site.

However, you should think carefully about guest blogging. As well as any other strategy this one has its pros and cons, and we definitely should consider them in detail.

We have chosen to sort out a huge amount of advantages and make a simple and short list for you with little descriptions.

1. Website Popularity

By posting on another website with a large audience with a well done article, you can extend the borders of your own site’s popularity, which means:

• A lot of traffic comes to your place with people who have read your words, liked them, and decided to explore more material you offer. They may come and go or stay for a little longer, sharing your content and linking to you, which is really great for your rankings;
• You can welcome a bunch of new interests and goals at your place. Such people are a breath of fresh air: they may enter your website and a bit later become your permanent subscribers who wait for new content from you or even offer some interesting topics to cover;
• Social media followers: social media has become hugely popular. People try to develop their social media accounts, and attract more people, by posting a lot of related material – this provokes comments, shares, likes, a lot of new followers, which leads to an extension of your popularity far beyond social media, which means more backlinks. Just don’t forget to communicate with your audience;
• Feedback is the golden apple in your pocket: feedback from ordinary people about how great your content is on your website or others, especially from those who have some authority…all this makes you more reliable and interesting. People like to read a comments section first and then build up their opinion about your product. Bad feedback about you can spread faster than you can even imagine, so be on the ball.

2. Reputation

With a well written article, you will build up a reputation as a writer, a good one or bad one. Accordingly, you will create a definite impression of your website throughout the Internet. Google is also watching you.

• By providing readers with great, fresh, and relevant content you will build your own authority and heighten the level of credibility among them and specifically in the niche you perform in. People perceive you as a professional concerning the sphere you are writing your posts about, which actually influences your traffic as well. We go directly to the most clued in people, because we believe them and their content;
• Remember that an earned reputation always works for you. Guest blogging is not a single article. You can guest publish on a regular basis, so be sure to provide quality and meet deadlines. Webmasters will not ever give you any opportunity to write anything for them once again if you can’t reassure them that you are a writer they need and who follows their rules.

3. Guest Blogging Opportunities and Business Benefits

Guest blogging provides you not only with people who come to your website, it gives you much more than you can think about at the moment. Let’s dive into this deeper:

• By posting your article on other websites besides yours, you extend your circle of acquaintance. They can be your potential partners, webmasters for other sites on which you can post your articles, and even candidates for ad hoc link exchanges. This is a widespread fact that your friends can give you more than you think. They are happy to be your accountants as well;
• Guest blogging gives you a chance to spread the word about your products. In your guest posts you can easily present your products, showing their benefits and importance to users. However, be careful, please: people don’t like direct advertisements. Even if they are not going to buy your products as soon as they read your article, people will be informed that such products exist. They can spread this information further, share this, and keep it all in mind. Who knows, maybe one day they’ll come to your website and become your customers;
• Such alink building strategy opens some new business opportunities. This could be a business collaboration with other website owners. With a greater amount of traffic which comes after a successful guest post, you can get the chance to offer webinars, teaching courses, new products and much more.

4. Better Search Engine Rankings

Google likes quality, and when it sees quality it works for you. So, this is one more chance to work on your SEO, for instance, to heighten your domain and page authority. In addition, if there are a lot of backlinks to your website and those are from trustworthy sites, Google can reward you with some extra points. Apart from this, with guest posts you can find an extra opportunity to promote other related articles in the form of anchor links.

5. Personal Benefits

There are a lot of benefits of guest blogging. With this you not only bring success to your website, you can also receive something for yourself:

• Guest blogging for someone who has never done this before is a new and useful experience. While writing for a new source, you will put all your knowledge and talent into each word you use. Creating content for new people always means new ways of writing, because the audience of big sites will be wider, more complex and more diverse than on your site. You should take into account each of these details and write something that fits everybody;
• You will improve your writing skills. When writing a new article, you will put all your talent into the process and make yourself a better writer. The more qualitative content you create, using new words, phrases, sentence structures, etc., the more experience and tips for writing you obtain. In each sentence you will use something new and “communicate” with the audience on a new level. Just compare your first articles and last ones and you will see what I’m talking about;
• You create unique content. Guest blogging is not only posting your material on a popular website. You still compete with people who are already popular in your niche and have some authority which is bigger than yours is. It is a real struggle to write something unique and catchy about topics that have already been mentioned. Outline yourself among competitors and offer something new for even old topics. Once you’ve done this, you can be proud of yourself and get traffic;
• Self-promotion comes with guest blogging. In guest posts you advertise not only your content and company, but also You “sell” your knowledge, skills, products, if they exist, and your name which is given in a bio after or before the post. You create your portfolio as well.

As well as other link building ideas, guest blogging, despite such juicy pros, also has its cons and they should be explored. Again we have a short list that includes a lot.

1. You Depend on Other People

If you write for websites, you should follow the rules and you may encounter not so pleasant consequences sometimes. This means:

• Somebody else may build their own authority using your name and material. If your article is well done, people will read it and spread it with the link to the website that contains the needed article, and this is not yours. People will visit your site only if they read your content till the end, so a significant part of the backlinks your post receives will go to the benefit of the website you wrote for;
• Your article can be rejected. This depends on you and a website owner. If the content you’ve written is pretty poor and boring for a webmaster, he or she can reject your post and next time “look” at you with suspicion and disbelief;
• Editing can eliminate your uniqueness. Webmasters have a right to “clean” your content, change it a little bit, or give it to a professional editor and proofreader, who will investigate your material from A to Z. They can erase a part that sounds great for you and or change things to fit their opinion or business more. This happens more when you are a newcomer and don’t have a name and the needed experience.

2. No Guarantees

Link building ideas can’t guarantee you success, so you should not rely on one strategy. Here are the main reasons why guest blogging can pass you by:

• Because of the popularity of guest blogging, you may not be chosen to write something for websites with, for example, a high domain authority. This can happen because of the low popularity of your name, i.e. an article from an unknown author may not be OK with a big site. However, you can start with websites which are not so widespread and, by a step by step process, reach those you’ve been dreaming about;
• It takes a lot of time to see some results of guest blogging. If you want to see them right away, you should write as a guest more However, it’s unlikely for this to work, because writing of great articles is a long process, as everything should be unique. Great content demands great effort.

3. Harmful Impact

• Harmful associations can’t be avoided on the Internet, where surroundings are not so clean. They appear when you post your articles on untrustworthy or toxic websites, when people who share them have already lost their reputation, or if you decide to go for plagiarism. To protect yourself and your website from a Google penalty you should always check websites you are going to write for and present only unique material;
• Never go to spammy websites or those which are of low quality, if you don’t want to lose link quality, because this may damage your website’s rankings. You can check the quality of backlinks with the help of the WebCEO Backlink Quality Check Tool, which gives full information regarding the parameters and the level of reliability of all your backlinks;
• Spammers are everywhere. No-one will ever beat them. They come to every house and make it dirty. Be aware of this and clean the territory of your website and the post’s comment section after posting your guest post.

4. Great Risks

Nowadays risks are everywhere. However, forewarned is forearmed!

• One of the greatest risks is to not understand your target audience. Make time to analyze deeply who you will write an article for as well as the website itself – whether if fits your niche or not. If you write an article for basketball lovers and put this into the table sports section, this will be your greatest failure: you will never get even a single reader;
• With bad writing you can just forget about guest blogging at all. We don’t even need more words here;
• Content syndication is when your content is published on multiple websites. So the place of your content will not be unique anymore and your article will be spread all over the Internet. For SEO this means duplicate content which Google doesn’t like, but if this is tagged (rel=canonical) and indexed (content=”noindex,follow”) properly, everything will be okay.

5. Personal Losses

Everybody values their resources and people who do guest blogging are not an exception.

• Guest blogging always means unpaid work. This doesn’t matter if your material is great enough to even be published for money in papers or magazines: in this case you will get no money – only web benefits;
• You will spend a lot of time and effort for a single article, making unique and interesting content, and this can be really sad if you don’t get anything in the end;
• Too much time for guest blogging and too little time for your own website. It is always vitally important to find balance between guest blogging and your own website updates. You can be popular enough to guest blog more often, but there is no sense in this if you can’t offer fresh content to your own site’s audience. They will bounce more often this way.

LET’S GET STARTED!

Your target audience will be your potential clients; people who are interested in content you create. Those can be representatives of different ages, locations, and spheres of interest. It is rather important to properly identify a circle of people who can be interested in your further content. Even a single guest post should be prepared carefully and be focused on the needed audience.

There are a few steps you should take to find relevant new readers:

1. Analyze your current audience to understand who is already interested in content you provide. This is rather important because with the help of this step you can find out ways to extend your audience. Learn who they are: age, gender, location, educational level, income level, and their occupation (through fast surveys on your website or during sign up). Then go into personal things like personality, hobbies, and lifestyle.

2. This will come in handy if you conduct such research concerning your competitors’ audiences as well in order to understand who is interested in them and, of course, what they offer to their readers. Why should you do this? Because a competitor’s audience is also your potential audience as both of you provide material/products of the same niche. Learn why people go to their websites instead of yours, do better, and welcome people at your place.

3. Analyze the topic you are going to write about and analyze the statistics regarding its demand among different layers of population, ages and locations. Maybe you should spend more time on research and then think carefully about following a certain writing style and type of presenting information – how exactly you can attract people who are interested in your niche and have them fully satisfied with your content.

4. Write an article, taking into account everything that has been mentioned.

A tool which you can use to get necessary data: Google Analytics, which will disclose both types of data: demographic (age, gender, location) and physiographic (people’s lifestyle). In addition, this will show you information regarding sessions, bounce rate, transactions, and revenue on your website.

There are a lot of guest blogging sites where you can post your material, but the problem is to find the one or several that fit you best. This mission is not so simple, but you are definitely able to do this.

• The first thing you should do is to identify your niche – what you will write about and which topics you can cover as a After this you can bravely look for sites which are of your niche and where you can be useful. The simplest way to do this is to use Google. Type keywords related to your field in a search box and some of the best search results will be your candidates to choose from. Go to those websites’ blog sections if they have them, and start the investigation process: what they write about, who writes for them (businessmen, freelancers, or journalists), which topics are the most popular, etc. Maybe, some of them are looking for guest blogging writers.
• The next way is pretty widespread among those who often go for guest blogging. You just need to type your keywords with the next phrases or similar to them: “accepting guest posts”, “submit content”, “guest post”, etc. in a search box, and you will receive data on more sites for guest blogging. This is pretty simple and a little bit similar to the first variant, because further actions are alike: investigate everything, starting from available material and
• You yourself may be a frequent visitor of a website, where webmasters sometimes allow others to post articles. Then take this chance! This can obviously help you because you already know the audience of the website and, maybe, you even know some users who may be interested in your content/products.
• The next great source is Connectively, a website which provides journalists with new contacts for content they want to write about. This is not a guest blogging opportunity per se, but close to it. You can write a decent text and image outline for a journalist to officially write an article with their own byline, but with a link to your website. You should remember that your content in this case should be of the highest quality, relevant and compelling enough for the journalist to want to put their name on it and link to you.
• Apart from this, you can always try to knock on the doors of the most popular websites which are known to almost every blogger, for example, HubSpot, Marketing Land, Entrepreneur, Alltop.com, and many others. However, take into account your popularity and the direction you want to choose for your article! Small websites are also a valuable source if you are just a beginner and don’t have any experience in this sphere.
• Don’t forget that you can use your competitors to find new places where your content will be a perfect match. WebCEO’s Competitor Backlink Spy Tool will show you detailed information on your competitors’ backlink profiles. The data will let you know which websites are relevant to your type of content. These sites, which link to your competitors now, can potentially link to your site in the near future. With this insight, you will open new paths for promoting your material and new topics to work on, proving that you are a great representative of your niche. Analyze the content of your competitors, learn their good and bad aspects, create great copy that will stand out, and then offer it to webmasters who previously thought that your competitors were worth linking to.

• In addition, you can check a list of 200+ websites which are accepting guest posts in 2022 or a huge list of 5000+ guest posting sites, and another one with about 54 guest posting websites, in order to find the best place!

An important thing to remember before you go to the next step: ALWAYS check the quality of websites you’ve chosen to write an article for: domain authority, number of backlinks, security, website’s traffic through Alexa, and even people’s words about those websites, if this is possible.

Once you’ve found a website which looks like a good fit for you, negotiations begin. You want a backlink in exchange for your piece, but there’s more than one option to consider. What kind of backlink is the best?

Ideally, of course, you want to shoot for dofollow links in your guest posts. However, most websites which accept contributions have a “nofollow links only” policy for their guest authors. It’s not as bad as it sounds; nofollow links are only slightly less powerful than dofollow. Despite the name, sometimes Google may actually follow and crawl those links (which is what they mean by treating “nofollow” as a hint signal) to evaluate content on the linked pages.

Let’s also not forget about rel=”sponsored” links. As the name implies, the rel=”sponsored” attribute is reserved for paid links (e.g. sponsored posts). You may remember that Google doesn’t approve of the practice of buying backlinks, but it’s fair game if a link is openly declared as such by using this attribute. That way, nobody will be penalized, though it does tell Google about the insentive behind placing such a link, and it will be evaluated accordingly.

But don’t let it get to you. Dofollow, nofollow and sponsored links look all the same to users, so you won’t be missing out on user traffic. That comes down solely to the website’s popularity and your own post’s quality.

We have come to the most important part.

After you’ve found a website you want to write for, the next thing to do is to contact its owner in order to get permission for your article to be posted on the website. It is better to choose several topics and then offer them altogether. This will give a webmaster an opportunity to choose from and see that you can master more than one topic. Accordingly, you get more chances to be chosen or at least to be kept in mind. However, as this was mentioned a bit earlier, there is no 100% guarantee that you will be approved immediately, so don’t wait for instant results.

The way you contact a webmaster is pretty simple – through email or social media messaging systems, the most important of which is LinkedIn. However, this also demands some effort. Nowadays there are a lot of writers who want their material to be published, so you should be outstanding starting from the subject of your letter. You have to raise some interest from the very first words in order to be noticed among thousands of similar letters; choose something unusual and catchy, something that will definitely attract some attention to you.

After that you should work on the body of your letter. The same conditions: catchy, interesting, and beneficial for a website owner, not for you. We prefer to communicate with polite people who know something about etiquette, don’t we? So, don’t be cheap on politeness and complements and describe why their website got your attention and which posts particularly, and then write about things you want to give to their benefit. Be direct, short, and present two or three ideas, cogently describing their filling: topic, headline, and word count. If you have some great material on your website, you can leave some links in order to show that you are talented and professional enough to write for somebody. Here is a simple example, which is not obligatory to use:

To: webmaster@gmail.com

From: iwillwriteforyou@gmail.com

Subject: Do you have an article about baking fruit into pies and cakes?

Hello Jenny!

I’ve been reading you for a long time, realizing day by day that you provide, undoubtedly, the best material in your niche. However, I’ve noticed that you haven’t published any article concerning baking fruit into pies. I would be really glad to provide you with a great article about this and offer you some other variants:

#1

Topic: Bakery.

Headline: “Donuts and Cakes with Fruit Are All You Need”.

Word count: 1500 – 2000.

#2

Topic: Science.

Headline: “Lemons for Science or How to Start Liking Lemons”.

Word count: 1500 – 2000.

#3

Topic: SEO.

Headline: “WebCEO gives you the best fruit related keywords”.

Word count: 1500 – 2000.

 

You’d get a lot of traffic with one of these articles. I have a lot of experience in writing, with such articles as you can find here and here: *links*

Thank you! I will wait for your response.

 

Best regards,

Sally.

However, remember, that some serious and authoritative websites will ignore you. Let’s take The New York Times as an example here. They accept Op-Ed essays but mostly only from their favored contacts. In this case you should be polite, formal, direct, and cogent, especially in your subject line. It is also better to have a widespread name and high authority in terms of your sphere to have a chance of writing for them.

You can learn some other details about essay submission to The New York Times.

The next step is to wait. An answer to a good proposal can come after a whole week, if not longer, so don’t give up hope the next day. After you have received an approval message, it’s high time to start writing AND send a “Thank you” letter to the webmaster for the given opportunity.

Here are also some inspiring pieces of advice of How to Never Run Out of Blog Post Ideas. Check this out in order to always be ahead of your competitors and not undergo “freezing periods”.

First things first: make sure you can attach your guest writer’s bio to your posts wherever possible – and, fortunately, it is possible almost everywhere. Aside from introducing yourself in your bio, make sure to link to your social media profiles as well: that’s what Google uses to establish that different pieces of content were written by the same author.

SEO and Google search are entering an age of entities, an age that’s expected to revolutionize or even replace link building as we know it. Becoming one such entity will definitely make your name carry a lot of weight – and, if you can become famous, so will your website.

What about the more proactive ways of boosting your popularity?

The first option is to use your own website: leave a link to your guest post, so your visitors will be able to enjoy your content more and may become your constant readers.

The second option is to use social media. Leave a short and challenging description with a link and your post picture on all your accounts with appropriate hashtags. Going through hashtags, people can notice your post, read it, like it, and share it with others in the end, which means more traffic, followers, and subscribers on your website via the guest post on the other site. In other words, you can increase your traffic via social media, even if you are directly linking only to the other website.

In your social media post, you can tag people who will be alerted to your post automatically. This is a sneaky but effective way to gain attention from such people.

Performance Tracking.

Be sure to use the WebCEO Chosen Link Watch Tool in order to keep track of the backlinks to the guest post on the other website – those ones which you strived to get with guest blogging. This tool is extremely useful to monitor your links and be aware if:

1. a webmaster changed the anchor text of your link;
2. a webmaster tagged your link as nofollow:
3. a webmaster eliminated your link entirely;
4. a webmaster applied user-agent cloaking.

If you encounter these violations you can take appropriate measures. Never give anybody an opportunity to deprive you of an award for hard work!

TO SUMMARIZE: guest blogging has a lot to offer. First, this is a great opportunity to present your content to a new audience interested in your niche and converting people into your readers. Second, this is a rather successful method of building backlinks and getting traffic for your website. Of course, this is not perfect, but in capable hands, guest blogging can bring a lot of benefits. WebCEO is always by your side to help you. Find real link opportunities with WebCEO right away:

The post An Ultimate Guide to Guest Blogging That Works appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

In the previous chapter, we discussed important off-page SEO factors that need to be constantly monitored and implemented for the growth of your website’s popularity. Today we will discuss local SEO. 

Local SEO is a huge topic for discussion. Google says it wants to give everybody an opportunity to be seen in local search results. If you are in the local league, then this chapter is a must read. 

CHAPTER 5: LOCAL SEO

Spotlight: GOOGLE MY BUSINESS – A MUST HAVE

Google My Business was launched in 2014 and has been helping local businesses get seen on the SERPs, primarily as Maps results. It’s the most important directory listing of all these days. You must have this directory filled out with important information for prospective customers.

This is the way the information about your business is presented in local search results on a desktop:

and on a mobile device:

N/B: These screenshots are for business categories that supply customers with food and beverage. If your business is from another category, there is a subtle difference between sections presented in the side bar except for permanent ones.  Permanent sections are: Home, Posts, Info, Insights, Reviews, Messaging, Photos, Website, Users, Products.

Basically, you will only need to fill out some forms. Once your listing is accepted, you will be able to see analytics data and this data can also be imported into the WebCEO tools.

The “Insights” section will provide data on:

• queries your business was found for;
• the way customers reached your business: direct, discovery or branded search;
• where your business was found (the “Views” section): on Google Maps or Google Search;
• customer actions: website visits, direction requests and phone calls;
• popular time: time periods your business is demanded most often;
• photo views.

After that you will want to update the information as often as possible to give customers only the freshest data. 

• Apart from that, you will be able to “work with your customers”: process incoming reviews (reply to them, edit them and delete) via Google My Business, start messaging with your customers, and upload some posts and photos. 
• If you don’t have a website for your business – it’s not a problem anymore, because with Google My Business you can easily create one.  
• You can keep track of your business even if you have a chain of stores and you can add as many users as you wish to the account. They will help you manage and watch everything that happens at your office/restaurant/cafe, etc. 

Google My Business has become a major free business listing platform. Don’t wait to create an account there! As soon as you’ve done this, WebCEO will open a new door for you. 

WebCEO’s Google My Business Module was created to help users keep an eye on their local performance and reveal their weak and strong sides of their business activity. WebCEO integrates well with Google My Business. 

WebCEO adds some extra conveniences such as an easier location switcher if you manage a chain, an opportunity to find and analyze your competitors and add their domains to other WebCEO tools. Also, WebCEO allows a user to compare and analyze data from different time periods. 

Spotlight: LOCAL FOCUSED WEBSITE OPTIMIZATION

To perform well in the SERPs you will not only need an optimized Google My Business account, but also some work done on your website. People will find your business because of keywords you are going to optimize your website for.

Your goal is to appear in the Google Local 3 Pack:

Here are some tips on local optimization that you should check with double accuracy:

• Localize your keywords adding the exact business location to your content: coffee houses in New York, best pizza in Washington, DC., etc.
• Use long tail keywords that include other words people use to describe your location and specific well known places that are near business.  
• Create a page with a detailed NAPU, working hours, service/product description, and pricing;
• Make your website mobile-friendly because people mostly use local search on their mobile devices;
• Insert important information about your special services and products in a snippet, such as “Pastry for special occasions. Wedding and Birthday Cakes. Christmas Pies. Every day, from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Online orders. Free delivery”;
• Create content that will be relevant to your local business: this is an opportunity to increase your authority. Create more than three pages of content with keywords that are relevant to your business, for instance add a brief history of your industry, fresh news, announcements, updates, seasonal menus or special offers, prominent figures, and so on;
• Google My Business is not the only local directory on the Internet. Submit your website to other major and popular directories, such as Facebook, Apple Maps, Yelp, Bing, Yellow Pages, etc. 

 IMPORTANT!  Google no longer shows self-serving reviews that were inserted in a website’s markup or taken from third-party websites. This change was implemented in September 2019 as a part of the Google September 2019 Core Update.

Spotlight: COVID-19 MEASURES TO FOLLOW

I doubt this section will be breaking news, but Covid updates show Google you’re an active business, so it’s important to keep this in mind:

1. Implement changes Google offered and present new services.

Google has helped local businesses via Google My Business. They implemented new types of attributes that help potential customers to see what businesses are safest to attend. 

Change your workflow according to some of these attributes (better to work on each of them):

Mention the opportunity for contactless payment. 

Google introduced a new feature – Food Ordering. You will get a button “Online Order” right on the SERP. You will have to cooperate with “approved third party providers” to activate this type of feature. 

We can’t predict how long the situation will last, but we are sure that these types of services – that ease people’s interaction with local businesses – will be popular forever. 

Consider the opportunity to always work with delivery, takeaway, online ordering and so on. 

Even such businesses that require a physical presence can be adjusted to current times: there are a lot of services for communication or video presentations and other types of activities. 

Of course, if your business is open to welcome visitors, remember to mention online that you follow basic safety measures, such as handwashing and antiseptic stations and servers wearing various forms of protection. 

2. Modify content on your website.

If there are any changes you want to introduce regarding COVID-19, emphasize them on your website:

• Banners on the index page of your website

This is a perfect place for advertising banners and announcements. Such announcements can cover new services you would implement for people to know about them and use them.

• Content and snippets

Ad banners will eventually be removed from your index page, but you can immortalize information by adding it to the main website content. Hence, it will also be seen by people in the SERPs. 

Also, edit your snippets to outline new available services. This can be a temporary decision for the time when you want to draw the attention of a greater audience. 

Spotlight: PPC/GOOGLE ADS FOR LOCAL BUSINESSES

Google Ads is not a compulsory way to promote your business. However, it will be extremely useful if you want to get quick results. The difference is in the working process: you have to work on your ad in a local-focused way, i.e.:

• define products you want to advertise and Google will show this ad to people who use similar queries to find that very product within the area you’ve chosen;
• create themed landing pages, two or three pages for each campaign, to analyze which one works better and brings more traffic. Remember that these should be relevant to the products you are going to promote. 
• you have to choose localized keywords and point to the exact territory you want your advertisement to be shown within. Don’t forget to indicate specific languages your marketing campaigns are built for, etc.;
• prepare text that will complete local criteria: these may be seasonal or holiday discount events that are typical for a particular area. Use local services, i.e. delivery companies that are available in your region, to make a user’s online and offline experience better and easier.

Spotlight: GOOGLE LOCAL SERVICES ADS

[ currently available only in the USA and Canada ]

Aside from Google Ads there is a platform from Google that will help you find more clients on the Internet. That is Google Local Services Ads. This is more than just advertising; this is a guarantee from Google that your business deserves its place under the sun. 

Access to Google Local Services Ads gives you a line of real benefits: 

• more real clients;
• client flow management;
• clear picture of your advertising campaign success;
• an opportunity to ask your clients for reviews;
• the procedures are similar to Google Ads;
• you will pay only after a real call or message.

Local Services Ads operates two types of badges one of which a business gets after signing in to Local Services:

GOOGLE GUARANTEED

To receive this badge your business has to go through a background check and license and insurance verification. This badge is for in-home services, such as plumbing, locksmithing, electricity, etc. 

The peculiarity of “Google Guaranteed” is that you not only have Google’s praise and opportunity to appear in local services ads, but also coverage from the company for unsatisfied clients (max. $2000/CAD $2000 per business for a lifetime). 

HOW DOES GOOGLE COVERAGE WORK?

An unsatisfied client has a right to submit a claim and receive his or her money back from Google (the amount of money spent on a service, not $2000 at once). But only if the service was booked via Google Local Services Ads. Google will give the business a chance to resolve the conflict and, after its own investigation, the outcome will be announced

N/B: you can’t use the badge on your website. It appears only in local services ads listings.

GOOGLE SCREENED

This badge is available for such spheres as Law, Financial Planning, and Real Estate.

A business can apply for the badge only if it has a 3.0 rating or higher. A business will also go through a massive background and license check. 

The Google Screened designation doesn’t have Google coverage. 

Tools to use:

Google My Business will help you manage all the sides of your local performance and make it visible on the SERPs.

Google Local Services Ads will help you a lot in advertising and looking for real clients. 

The WebCEO Google My Business Module will extend your possibilities in interpreting your local SEO results. It will show you how well you’ve been doing during specific periods of time and will help you organize communication with customers and conduct analysis of your competitors without extra clicks and page shifting. 

As an all-in-one SEO platform, WebCEO guarantees you an easy workflow. Integrations with valuable sources of data help users engage themselves and get profitable results while saving time not gathering data on their own from many different places on the Internet.

IN CONCLUSION, we hope that we have comprehensively answered your question “how to do SEO yourself?” These chapters were rich and full of cost-effective DIY SEO tips. We hope that all our tips and explanations were clear to you.

It’s time to work! Create a to-do list for yourself and start the work as soon as you are ready. It is important to not only keep track of new features, updates and services, but also to implement them and always keep them in your mind. 

WebCEO is ready to help you with new ideas that appear on the radar. Start your journey with WebCEO’s Keyword Research Tool and optimize your website to attract new customers and increase your rankings!

The post DIY SEO Guide for Beginners: Attract Local Customers Online. Part V appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

In the previous chapter we discussed the technical aspect of your website’s performance and how it can influence your position on the SERPs and people’s impression of your website. 

Today, we will discuss the creation of content and the most valuable elements of it. We will learn how to create, decorate and structure your content.

CHAPTER 3: WHAT IS ON-PAGE SEO AND HOW TO WORK ON IT

Spotlight: CONTENT

Create written content of the highest quality that will work for you. 

The type of the content and its quantity depend on your niche. If your niche is ecommerce you may think that you don’t need a lot of written content because your goal is to sell a product but not to describe it. 

However, it is still vitally important to have text fragments that can attract a reader and search engines via keywords.  

There are websites that are all about written material but not selling any products. They present information about different niches and topics and have enough content. Don’t think you don’t belong in their league. People always search content and any sphere can be extended to a hundred pages of interesting text. The best way to complete this task is to create a blog section.  

If you still don’t have a blog, it’s high time to do something. What are the benefits of blogging? Look here:

• Writing anywhere from 21 – 54 posts can significantly boost traffic to your blog by 30%.
• Blogs can give you credibility and authority.
• Blogging builds TRUST.
• An updated blog is a sign of a business that cares about their community.

Whether you have a blog section or not, we want to underline some points to follow in order to present your content in the best light possible:

UPGRADE YOUR TEXT

Do you like plain text? 

Like this: 

Source: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/skillshub/?id=366

Neither do we. Such text presentation is boring and people may leave a page as soon as they see how the content is presented. No doubt academic texts are still in demand among students but you can benefit from this only if you produce educational content.

#1: Logical Structure

We don’t like the idea of ploughing through thousands of boring sentences in order to find that little part we were interested in at the very beginning. 

Follow some content decorating tips to convince your reader that he or she has come to the right place.

• The TITLE (MAIN HEADER) is the first thing a reader pays his or her attention to. Apart from the fact that it should be relevant and include keywords, your title should also be flashy and interesting. It says a lot about the way an article is written.

Economic news article titles (main headers) are a pure art. They are courageous (but not scandalous), short, and intriguing. Look at some of them and find your style. 

Keep in mind that headers with specific words such as “How to…” or “Must/Should Know/Do/Check” affect readers better.  

• A clear structure of your article helps readers better process the material and get all the ducks in a row. Structure is supposed to have dividers, HEADINGS AND SUBHEADINGS, that help a reader navigate in the text and catch the elements of your article faster.

Also: headings and subheadings are great points to insert keywords.

• The SIZE OF TEXT BLOCKS is as important as any other detail. We write for a user and have to think about his or her time and desire to read straight text in paragraphs. Let your text fragments be of 50-150 words. This will make your article an easy-and-fast-read.

• If you’re going to dive into long-form content or want to display a large amount of information at once, don’t forget about the TABLE OF CONTENTS. This will help your current and future readers find pieces of content they were interested in right away.

#2: Content Layout and Formatting

Formatting usually means “games with text” as I like to call it. At this stage you should make your text as bright and pretty as possible. Different fonts, highlighting, bold, italic, underlined words of diverse sizes and colors emphasize the importance of specific parts of the text. 

• Bulleted and numbered lists are appreciated. They help readers a lot because they are associated with the important information to remember. Usually, content presented in such a form is processed better.

#3: Style

Your style of writing is the best thing that can define you among other writers. 

The main points are: be simple, yet informative and interesting, and be UNIQUE.  

By “informative” we mean topic disclosure from every possible angle. The topic you are going to write about is better to be analyzed from each possible perspective and it doesn’t matter how difficult it is. First learn and then tell. 

Use a clear and straightforward writing style in order to help readers understand everything. A satisfied reader is one who leaves a page of your website with no unanswered questions and goes on to read other articles on your site.

We understand that our advice can’t be applied everywhere because your content may belong to a niche where simple writing is just impossible, like online science magazines, some technical or programming websites. These are spheres where you will have to know all the difficulties of the niche to understand a single article. 

#4: Visual Media

Visual media should be in your articles. Images (e.g. screenshots, infographics, pictures, photos), videos, audio materials, documents help readers browse new material in a more captivating and less monotonous way. Moreover, this type of content presentation leads to more shares. People like to share visually nice and meaningful things. You will get benefits: traffic and backlinks (if a website openly links to you). Visual media optimization is a detail you definitely should take care of. This will help you get vertical search results. Images with proper alt text will appear in image search results for a searcher’s query.

Alt text (alternative text) is a word or a phrase inserted into an HTML file to disclose the meaning of an image.

The same thing works with videos and other types of content. Since podcasts are becoming more and more popular day by day, you can play with audio formatting. 

So, you have all the possibilities to get the top position on the SERPs, just use them. 

#5: Anchor texts

If you create written content, you should definitely use and mention some sources in your copy. Such mentions are built in the form of anchor links.

Anchor links are links to outside sources that you used to get more information on a topic which was displayed in your article. BE CAREFUL! Never work with spammy or untrustworthy websites because they can damage your website. As a result, your ranks will go down.

Anchor texts should always be relevant to the content. Don’t use “click here”, “more here” or “more results”. Make the anchor texts relevant to the article and attractive. Write something similar to “get extended information on dog breeds if you like” if it happens you are writing about dogs. 

Live example:

Source: https://neilpatel.com/blog/seo-strategies/ 

#6: Length

The length of a single post in 2021 is recommended to be approximately 2100-2400 words. This is a good size for a post that will bring conversions. Of course, you can’t always keep within these limits. There are situations when a single post can reach more than 3000 words. This is fair for educational materials with statistics and research. If you want to follow this example, you will have to spend a great amount of time on research and analysis.   

However, having a lot of words is not a good decision, if you are going to write a simple blog post. If you deal with long form content like guides, tutorials, case studies, you can allow yourself more freedom and write as much as your soul wants within reason. The main requirements: be relevant, trustworthy, interesting, and fresh. Remember that you aren’t writing a book. 

#7: Content Updates

Google admires fresh content and considers its freshness as a ranking factor. This applies not only to new posts. If you have old articles which are still topical but require some revision, make some time for rewriting. 

If you think that one article is everything you need, I will disappoint you: you will have to constantly update your content – release new articles or edit the old ones. This is necessary to stay in your league longer. One article will be considered past history too soon for people even to find it because other websites may update their material almost two-three times a week and even more often.

You can BENEFIT FROM YOUR MOST SUCCESSFUL COMPETITORS: 

1. Investigate their blog section; if they don’t have one, analyze the way they present their products on the pages of their website;
2. If your competitors have topics which you haven’t displayed yet, then take them and write better;
3. Learn their history of updates and decide on the time and frequency of your updates.   

#8: FAQs

There are useful sections Google has implemented on the SERPs: a featured snippet, a knowledge graph, Searches related to, and People also ask. Why not use them for the betterment of your website?

A featured snippet is a snippet in the form of an answer box above the Google organic search results. It gives a user a direct answer to his or her search query with a link to a source where this information was taken.

A knowledge graph is a graph on the right side of the Google SERP which represents brief and structured information on your search query. It is usually fuller than a featured snippet.

People also ask and Searches related to are tables from Google that, depending on a search query, show topically similar queries that other searchers looked for.

WebCEO’s Rank Tracking Tool will show you whether your website had a featured snippet on a specific search query:

First, create an FAQ section and give full and clear answers to common questions about your niche and product on your website. Remember that they have to be relevant to the topic of your article. 

Structure your content to answer the following questions: What? When? Why? Who? Where? and How? By doing this, there will be greater chances of being chosen for featured snippets and knowledge graphs by Google. 

Use an FAQ schema markup to make your FAQs visible to readers even on the SERPs themselves. 

Second, work tightly with the People also ask and Searches related to sections. They are more useful than you may think. There Google displays the most popular search queries within your topic. Anticipate curious search questions, repeat them as headers and mention answers for these questions in your article. You will attract more readers and implement more key phrases in your content.

#9: Cornerstone Content 

Cornerstone content is basic content; content that is written on the main (basic) topics of the niche.

Let’s say your website is about a tea ceremony. You might optimize your website for such long tail keywords as “what is the tea ceremony”, “history of the tea ceremony”, and “the tea ceremony in Japan”. 

A decent basic set, isn’t it? These are keywords people will most likely type in a search box if they are not familiar with the topic. If you want them to come to your website to find answers to these questions, you should write articles with these keywords in the titles. 

This will be your cornerstone content. 

WHY IS CORNERSTONE CONTENT A MUST HAVE?

• People will always look for content that can explain basic principles of specific topics because they “are programmed” to learn something new every day. This is a good opportunity to attract new subscribers and become their first source of valuable information. They will not have a desire to go to other websites;
• Such keywords have high search volumes. They will increase your chances to be shown on the SERPs, and prove that your content is more engaging and more interesting than Wikipedia’s. 

#10: Media Formats

People tend to learn new information in different formats. They seek timesaving methods of data presentation and examination. We don’t have many hours to sit at our computers, tablets, or mobile devices and strictly read article after article. 

That’s why highly shareable infographics, videos and podcasts are becoming more and more popular. Soon they will be a dangerous competitor to written format. In some areas, at least.

If you want to diversify your content and attract more customers, you should at least try to rebuild your content into some podcasts. People can now listen to podcasts directly from the SERPs, so this will be a great opportunity to rank high for some additional queries:

As a little addition, you can submit your podcasts.  

The same is true for YouTube videos which are faster to watch than to read, easy to share, and simply more convenient to learn from. 

#11: CTAs

CTAs are a great means of conversion in the middle of your content and are a perfect segway into doing actual business, acquiring a new subscriber or otherwise getting action from a reader. Be careful: if you want to nudge your reader in a beneficial way, make your CTAs colorful and witty. People have had enough of them and are sick of seeing the same spammy CTAs. Be unique and catchy. Sometimes the way you present your content decides everything. 

The scheme is:

1. write highly engaging content (a blog post/ an infographic/a guide, etc.), promoting your services/products -> 2. place a CTA at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end with a straightforward offer to a customer -> 3. a reader pushes the “sign up” button and becomes your customer or a constant reader. 

#12: Voting, Sharing and Commenting

Make your content easy to share, evaluate and comment on. There are a lot of WordPress plugins that help users spread the content they like on their social media, such as Social Snap, Easy Social Share Buttons etc.  

If you want to see what users think of your content, you can give them an opportunity to express their opinions in the easiest way possible: set up a star plugin, such as YASR, WP Customer Reviews, etc. 

There are a lot of plugins you can use in order to improve user experience and get real opinions to improve yourself.  

#13: Breadcrumb Navigation

If you have a large website with many categories and subcategories, you will need to create a “lantern” to light your readers’ paths. Breadcrumb navigation outlines a person’s way on a website. It’s useful for reaching the previous points of destination if a person wants to go back a few steps or simply to understand a website’s structure. 

You can build this on your website using WordPress plugins for breadcrumb navigation. 

There is also a breadcrumb trail on the SERPs. It’s become even more important to carefully select the words for the names of the sections of a site.

[Bonus] #14: About Page

On August 1, 2018, Google launched the “Medic” update to its algorithm punishing websites that can influence people’s well-being (YMYL websites). The E.A.T. concept has become an important part of your Internet existence.

The E.A.T. concept stands for expertise, authoritativeness, and trust. It means that, as a webmaster, Google must ascertain that you have a high level of expertise, authority, and trust in order to provide readers with the information that may have an impact on their lives.

To keep up with this concept, create an “About” page, describing your education/experience/certificates in the niche, showing that people can trust your knowledge.

Spotlight: INTERNAL LINKS OPTIMIZATION

Internal links are links between the pages of your website.

They say you can always link to the homepage of your website. But remember that a link to a page with some content costs more than to an empty one. 

HOW TO WORK WITH INTERNAL LINKS TO GAIN SEO AND READER BENEFIT?

1. Insert internal links into your article. Place links to your previous content that are relevant to the article you want to publish now. You will invite a reader to learn about other materials on your website.
2. Create a “Related Posts” section. You can do this with the help of WordPress plugins or by hand. Present a list of articles on your website that cover relevant topics, and people will investigate the horizons through the depth of your content to discover what else you can offer them.
3. Optimize your old posts. If you’ve written a new post that is topic-related to the older ones, you can return to them and insert a link to the new post and vice versa. Optimized old posts may bring more value to your website, as Google has already granted them some authority and will index these pages again. You will also supply users with fresher information. 
4. Optimize the anchor texts of internal links. Keep track of the anchor texts you are going to use. These should be descriptive in accordance with the article’s topic. Don’t forget to add keywords if it’s possible. 
5. Check that all of your internal links have a dofollow tag. You will simply lose value and the opportunity to improve your rankings with nofollow internal links.

WebCEO’s Internal Links Tool will come in handy for sure. This tool will show you link text analysis and authority analysis for your website’s pages, along with a landing page analysis and such important metrics as juiciness, status (OK, broken), and no/dofollow tags.  

Spotlight: Domain Name

The domain itself and its name are definitely things you have to care about a lot. 

WHY IS A DOMAIN NAME SUCH A BIG DEAL?

Factors that Google finds important:

• Domain History: this factor embraces trust, a website’s authority, the quantity of backlinks a website gets over time, the date of the first crawling. The better these figures are, the better you will rank on Google. 

N/B: Basically, you can use two types of domain names: brand new ones and old ones that already have a history on the Internet. If you want to have a new domain name, you will build its history from scratch. If you want to use an old one, be careful! An old domain name can have either a good or a bad reputation. You can succeed a lot or get in a lot of trouble. Use ICANN Lookup to learn whether a domain name is new or not and get full information about it.  

• Keywords in a domain name: having keywords in your domain name will help your website rank higher in the SERPs because they are related to the direction of your business and your content. The more precise your domain name for the field of operation and the more valuable your keyword is, the more chances to get to the top you will have. However, be restrained: as too many keywords will look spammy.
• No hyphens: domain names like my-site.com you’d better avoid. Search engines consider these to be spammy. Furthermore, such names are confusing and difficult to remember: if a hyphen is missed, users will surely find another website with your name but without the hyphen;
• EMD: Exact Match Domain refers to a Google algorithm update focused on showing users websites with domain names that exactly repeat the searcher’s query. 

Before choosing a name for your website, make time to look through some popular search queries related to your niche and relevant to the content you are going to provide users with to see which names are already used and have attained the top position. 

Factors that other webmasters find important are:

• Domain Authority is a metric created by Moz that is a prediction of how popular a website will be in the future. The higher the DA the better. The maximum score is 100. It is important for webmasters because, taking DA into consideration, they can assume benefits will be obtained from getting backlinks from a given website. 
• Page Authority is a metric created by Moz that is a prediction of how popular a website’s page will be and how it will rank on the SERPs. 

• TLD: Top-level domains such as .com, .edu, .org, .net, .gov will always be more desirable to link to because they are more trusted and authoritative than others. These are also the best candidates for your backlink profile because they can bring a lot of juice to your website, except for situations when a nofollow attribute is applied to a backlink you get from them.

rel=“nofollow” is an attribute to a link which shows that it has no value for a referred website while rel=“dofollow” lets a backlink lead juice to the referred website.

rel=“sponsored” is an attribute to a sponsored/paid link that is placed for advertisement.

rel=“ugc” is an attribute added to a link that is placed by a user in a comments section, on forums, etc.

• 301 Redirect for a www. subdomain: people don’t usually type the full address of a website if it has a www. subdomain, reducing this part, typing hello.com instead of www.hello.com. They don’t even imagine that search engines consider these websites as separate entities…but technically they are! Other people will assume your site is at www.yourdomain.com when there is no www. To account for this, use a 301 Redirect for non-www websites to make sure that people and backlink value will always come exactly to your spot.

SEO ADVICE!

Think properly about your domain name. Try to choose a name that will fully reflect your business or product, and be simple and catchy. Do this for your visitors’ convenience. They will remember your website easily and be able to recognize it instantly. Use Google Domains to find and buy a domain name that will be top-notch for your website.  

Spotlight: FAVICON

A favicon is definitely a thing you have to bring your attention to. The favicon usually appears on a browser tab, on bookmarks, and on the SERPs. 

A favicon is a small icon (16×16 pixels as per usual) that works as your website “identifier” in browsers:

This is not the very thing that decides everything or even plays a main role, but it is great to have your own identification sign each time a person clicks on your website.

WHY ARE FAVICONS SO IMPORTANT?

Favicons don’t have any straightforward influence on your website’s performance and rankings. They mostly exist to better user experience and your brand recognition. The advantages of favicons are:  

• You make your brand easier to recognize. We learn almost everything on the Internet with our eyes, so we tend to remember pictures faster and then recognize them even in a slightly familiar color scheme. Once our eyes catch the picture, we are in the game. This is a great chance to enter your users’ minds and let them find you even in a crowd;
• This makes your website look more solid and complete. Some people think that favicons deal with authority. A nice favicon gives readers an impression of a well-designed website.  It has become an essential part of any respectful Internet location, and you would be wise to follow suit;
• It is strange but favicons make us trust websites presented on the SERPs more. Look at how websites with favicons look in the mobile search results:

HOW TO CREATE A FAVICON

There are three main ways to complete this task:

• Hire a designer. Yes, this will cost you some money, but an experienced professional will create a unique logo, relevant to your niche and from scratch, that will match your website’s main theme and colors. 
• Draw it on your own with services like Favicon.cc, where you can both create and generate a favicon. 
• Use your website’s header image/image element. If you have a picture that you want to use as your favicon but don’t know how to convert it to the correct format and size, you can use Favicomatic to generate your favicon in the correct proportions and for a wide range of devices.

Remember the following points: 

• Make your favicon attractive, catchy and modern. A favicon is the first piece of visual media your visitors see before entering a website. Don’t destroy their first impression. Use popular and modern colors that will not make people laugh or think about old stuff. 
• No small elements. Favicons are small themselves, don’t try to make them complex. Save people’s eyes from a breakdown. Simple, not big, yet attractive elements which are easy to understand and like will be the best decision. You can also use letters.

Spotlight: URLs

URLs (a Uniform Resource Locator) also have a kind of influence on readers when they scan SERPs. In fact, you are able to change the URLs of your website as you like (not a domain name). You can build it with letters, numbers, words, phrases, and even sentences. On the other hand, you can leave them just as they are by default – a set of non-understandable written curses, like this:

https://www.hello.com/articles/asf-?382643

Who knows what this article is about? The URL presented above is a great example that you must not follow. People can easily miss your website if it does not fit the query perfectly. 

URLs give you an opportunity to use keywords:

Don’t use overly long URLs; otherwise these will not be seen completely on the SERP:

To sum up, URLs SHOULD:

• Be short – fit the browser’s search bar,
• Be descriptive,
• Be relevant,
• Contain keywords.

URLs SHOULDN’T:

• Contain unreadable standard elements and session IDs;

Spotlight: WEBSITE APPEARANCE

The first thing you see after clicking on a website’s title tag is its appearance. The user experience has become a detail everybody pays a lot of attention to. The quality of your website’s appearance has become a decisive factor in how long a user might stay on it. Let’s compare for a second two websites you may visit for whatever reason.

This one:

And this one:

Don’t know about you, but I will definitely stay on the second website, because this picture makes my eyes feel relieved and satisfied. Make your website’s appearance work for you better than any paid advertisement. Choose colors which are attractive and fit well, a great header picture and a minimum amount of words, except for the sections where these are needed. Remember that your minimum amount should reflect what you are going to present to your customers.

WHY IS APPEARANCE SO IMPORTANT AND HOW CAN ONE  MAKE IT EYE PLEASING?

Primarily we “touch” everything with our eyes. A beautiful picture we encounter as soon as we enter any website provokes further actions from our side: if we like what we see – we move forward to the other pages, if we don’t like it – we return to the SERP. Google notices these actions and notes your bounce rate which should be as low as possible. 

The bounce rate is a Google metric that represents the number of visitors who leave your website without doing anything (using the menu, clicking on links, etc.).

During the process of creating your website you should analyze your competitors. Visit their websites and track them down from A to Z, emphasizing the elements that are crucial reasons for their success and that you can use.

Analyze websites you visit often and learn what makes them beautiful and makes you chill out there. 

Tools to use for the On-page SEO: 

Yoast plugin for WordPress will help you make your snippets perfectly optimized. 

Google Structured Markup Data Helper and Schema Markup Validator will help you organize information about your website and tell Google how to present it directly on the SERPs. 

WebCEO SEO Platform:

The Rank Tracking Tool will help you see and analyze your rankings over time and see which types of search results you have appeared in. You will also see if any of your articles has been awarded a featured snippet.

The Site Health Tool – the “Internal Links” tab specifically – will help you work on the internal links of your website: analyze texts, authority, structure and landing pages. 

CONCLUSION OF THE THIRD CHAPTER

We have finished studying on-page SEO. Now you know what you should pay attention to during your self-optimization of websites and what elements require particularly careful study. Our journey is not over yet. Soon we will meet with you again and find out what else needs optimization. More fun is yet to come! You will learn how to make your website popular, attract more customers and get higher conversions. 

See you soon in the next chapter! 

The post DIY SEO Guide for Beginners: Make Your Content Work For Rankings. Part III appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

In the previous chapter, we talked about niche research and analysis, and the importance of these activities for proper strategy building. 

In this chapter, we will touch upon one of the most important aspects in a site’s performance that affects rankings and user experience. 

Technical SEO involves working on your website outside its content and promotion: server issues, broken pages, speed problems, etc. Today we’ll look at how Google analyzes sites, what it takes into account, and how you can ensure the proper functioning of your site.

CHAPTER 2: TECHNICAL SEO

Spotlight: CRAWLING AND INDEXING

Crawling is a process of “surfing” the Internet and scanning new websites in order to index them. This is performed by crawlers – Google robots, so-called spiders or googlebots. 

Indexing is the process of adding the data from your website to a search engine’s database (index).

Indexing is essential for your Internet existence. If you are not indexed by a search engine, then you will not be found in its organic search results.

To always be aware of what is going on with your website, create an account in Google Search Console. If you also target Bing – create an account in the Bing Webmaster Tool  as well. These are extremely useful and important free tools which will show you whether you have any problems with the technical side of your website’s performance or if you’ve got “a penalty”. 

A penalty from Google is not an official or literal penalty, it’s just a sign from Google that your website is apparently violating Google webmaster guidelines. This is usually seen by a sudden rank decrease in Google Search Console. 

You can easily fix all the mistakes and then request a review from Google to get rid of a penalty.  

There is also a “penalty effect” that comes when Google launches a new update to its algorithm. If your site doesn’t work in accordance with new rules, you’ll get dinged. Learn what each new update will be about and take appropriate measures. 

If your website is doing okay, you will have your Search Console looking clean and pleasant:

HOW DOES THE PROCESS OF INDEXING OCCUR?

[going forward: you don’t need to do anything; Google will complete everything for you]

• Crawlers surf the Internet and look for websites they haven’t worked on yet;
• As soon as the crawlers find such websites, they start processing data from the site and add it to the search engine’s index. Google Search Console will show you the results of indexing by Googlebots;

• If you have any issues with the indexing, you can use this article to find a real problem and fix it;

SEO TIP:

1. If you want your website to be indexed faster, then submit a Sitemap (it shows how your website is structured) in Google Search Console. Read more information on sitemap creation and submission.  
2. If you don’t want some pages to be indexed and appear on the SERPs, then add a robots meta tag saying noindex. 

HOW TO MAKE A WEBSITE EASILY CRAWLABLE?

Crawlability is improved when your website is well organized and crawlers don’t have any problems with it, such as broken pages, not found pages (404), and so on. 

• Submit a well-structured sitemap: you will help crawlers navigate and scan your website faster by providing them with a data map. 
• Optimize your internal links: by creating a network of internal links, you will ease the crawlers’ work. This will help them travel on your website and analyze content through anchor texts (also called Internal Link Texts).
• Increase your page speed: crawlers love it when pages load fast. This helps them scan a website quickly. 

Spotlight: WEBSITE ARCHITECTURE (STRUCTURE)

Website architecture is the structure of your website that helps a user navigate to different sections and subsections of your website:

If a user gets stuck while trying to understand where he or she should go on your website to find that very piece of information he or she needs, you’re in trouble.

HOW TO ORGANIZE YOUR WEBSITE ARCHITECTURE TO WIN THE GAME?

1. Conduct research: analyze your best competitor’s website architecture and other commonly satisfying templates.  
2. Design a scheme of your website (don’t be shy about using a piece of paper and a pen): 

• create a simple and convenient website layout with categories and subcategories;
• let a person from the outside look at it, analyze and offer some changes: always welcome new ideas;
• redesign your existing scheme if it’s needed.

3. Work on navigation: this concerns your website interlinking. Don’t let pages stay in a no-exit regime. Make it easy to walk from one page to another without clicking on the “back” button: provide a permanent menu bar. Easy navigation and instantly seen routes eventually result in a better user experience. 
4. Important parts should be spotlighted: the blog section is important for a website’s performance and popularity. Make it visible as soon as a user enters your website or at least easily reachable. Don’t leave a user without contact data and create a separate section for that.

Spotlight: WEBSITE SPEED

For Google and visitors, your site speed is an essential point of a well working website. 

As soon as a visitor enters a website and leaves it because it takes too long to load, Google sees this. Consequences: your bounce rate becomes higher, rankings become lower because you haven’t worked on your website properly and caused harm to the user experience. Who on Earth will wait for centuries for a single page to load in the age of multitasking? 

Not you, we suppose. Make your website speed-friendly and organize the best user experience. To analyze your speed power use Google PageSpeed Insights:

If you don’t want to go through thousands of pages, use WebCEO’s Landing Page SEO Tool to analyze your page speed and, in case of any mistakes, improve it with the help of free WebCEO Tips that you can find under the result panel. 

HOW TO INCREASE YOUR WEBSITE SPEED?

• Image Size and Formats: Images of a bigger size dampen page speed significantly. Convert images using free websites. Use images with specific formats such as JPEG 2000/XP or WebP that are easier to compress;
• Embed videos: To improve page speed it is better to embed videos hosted on platforms like YouTube or Vimeo; 
• Redirects: get rid of unnecessary and useless redirects because they “eat” too much page speed and time by directing a user from one spot to another;  
• JavaScript, CSS, HTML: 

First, you can minify them by reducing useless characters in your code.

Second, you can compress them – make them small to improve page speed. 

Third, you can remove render blocking JS by adding “async” or “defer” attributes to the HTML code – this will increase the speed of DOM and CSSOM building that are necessary for browsers to understand the “behavior” of your website’s components and create a rendering tree of your website. 

• CDN: use a Content Delivery Network if your users are far away from the server you’re paying for. You will help users get your content faster because it defines a user’s location and loads your data from the nearest server. This is much faster than waiting for a response from a distant server. 

Spotlight: SITE SECURITY

Security is important for all parties: webmasters, users who don’t like websites with “Not Secure” status, and Google which considers security as a ranking factor. 

The security factor gives users assurance of their personal data protection. This means a great user experience and praise from Google.

WHY DO YOU NEED TO SECURE YOUR WEBSITE SO BADLY?

Non-secure websites are dangerous for users because personal data they leave on a website may not be properly secured, thus can be stolen or used.

This is especially problematic with spammy links in a comment section. There is also the risk of being hit by DDoS attacks, malware, etc. 

DDoS attack (Distributed denial-of-service) is an attack against your network from multiple computers with a bunch of invalid requests that can’t be processed simultaneously. As a result, the system freezes: denies any requests or gets crashed, while data may get lost. 

Malware stands for Malicious Software that was created to cause harm to a system or steal data. These include viruses, Trojans, worms, botnets, etc.

HOW TO SECURE YOUR WEBSITE?

• HTTPS protocol instead of HTTP or “Not secure”: HTTPS protocol secures the data a user leaves on a website with the help of SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) and TLS (Transport Layer Security) certificates. These two scramble incoming personal data and make it impossible for hackers to read any of it. 

To protect yourself, you have to use secure hosting providers that will provide your website with an SSL certificate;  

• No postponed updating: every piece of software you use goes through changes or updates; make sure to always update to the newest versions of them because these can deal with improvement of security measures, fixing of dangerous bugs, or implementation of new features. All of these stands for improving your website’s way of work or that of its specific components;  
• No everlasting passwords: easy and forever used passwords are factors that put your security at serious risk. It’s a matter of seconds to hack your system and steal all your data and the data of your users. Not a great outcome at all. Change your passwords as often as possible and use password generators to create long and hard-to-get passwords. You will definitely sleep better at night;
• Limited access: give access to a website only to users who will not make any mistakes nor damage a website with invalid actions; 
• Make a copy of your website: a website backup is important in case of an unexpected crash, break down, or attack. If you have a copy of your website, you will have no problems with restoring its data if a problem occurs; 
• Computer Antivirus and Security Plugins: computer antiviruses will help you prevent the uploading or downloading of dangerous files that can “infect” your system. Security plugins in WordPress will protect your website from malware attacks as well. Furthermore, a penetration testing tool can monitor your website for security issues and run tests when needed.

Spotlight: MOBILE-FRIENDLINESS

In the era of mobile devices, your website has to meet all the requirements of mobile-friendliness. 63% of all US online traffic comes from smartphones and tablets. Desktops are no longer as popular as before, especially for teenagers and young adults who prefer only mobile chill-outs. 

Google emphasized the idea of urgent mobile optimization when it launched the Mobile-Friendly Update to its algorithm and implemented Mobile-First Indexing.

Mobile-First Indexing was enabled on July 1, 2019, after which Google has primarily indexed the mobile versions of new websites.

Check if your website is mobile-friendly with the Google Mobile-Friendly Test Tool:

Use WebCEO’s Landing Page SEO Tool for this matter as well. Handle useful tips and create a hundred percent convenient product for mobile users:

Follow Google Instructions to create a responsive web design for your website.  

Check how your website will respond on different devices with Google Chrome:

1. Go to developer tools:

2. Use the Toggle Device Toolbar and examine how your website looks like:

Tools to use for a Technical SEO Audit:

Google Search Console will help you manage the proper technical performance of your website and give a full report on indexing. 

Google PageSpeed Insights will help you check the page speed of your website and specify current problems. 

Google Mobile-Friendly Test will show whether your website is mobile friendly or not.

WebCEO tools: 

The Landing Page SEO Tool – the “Page Speed” and “Mobile Optimization” tabs specifically – will help you analyze your readiness for the mobile era of search so you can deliver fast content to users. 

CONCLUSION OF THE SECOND CHAPTER

That’s all for today! Technical SEO is crucial. Do not forget to check all aspects within this field to avoid sudden breakdowns and to keep users by your side. WebCEO will always be with you to help detect and eliminate any issues.

We will meet in the next chapter!

The post DIY SEO Guide for Beginners: Ensure the Technical Stability of Your Website. Part II appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

If you are not a fan of getting outside help, but still want to fine-tune a website, this DIY SEO guide will come in handy. 

Doing SEO yourself isn’t difficult but carries great responsibility. We will start from the very beginning and touch on all the important aspects of working on your or your clients’ projects including monitoring results.

Let’s take a deeper look at the steps you will need to consider to do SEO properly! 

CHAPTER 1. Explore Your Niche: SEO Research and Analysis

First and foremost, it’s important to remember there isn’t such a thing as “I’ve gone through this step and don’t need to come back to it anymore”. 

Each stage in the process of research, analysis and further optimization will complement the next one and sometimes you’ll have to go back and do previous steps over and over again. 

SEO is a never-ending process. Don’t forget that search engines are constantly developing, new rules are set and more and more players, such as your competitors, will be joining the game. 

You should always keep abreast of the latest trends and work on your own performance.

The SEO Glossary of must-know-terms

White hat SEO refers to website optimization that is performed without violating Google webmaster guidelines. 

Black hat SEO in contrast refers to website optimization that is performed with violating Google webmaster guidelines, e.g. keyword stuffing, spammy links, irrelevancy, invisible text, etc. 

Search engine ranking factors are a set of factors a search engine “takes into consideration” while ranking websites on the results pages (SERPs).

Spotlight: TARGET AUDIENCE IDENTIFYING

A target audience represents people of a specific age, gender, nationality, locality, line of work, or lifestyle who may be interested in your content and who you create and distribute your product for.

You will not take big steps in website optimization without knowing who is and could be interested in your content and whom you will create your content or products for. 

When you want to sell a house, you won’t like it if it will appear in front of someone who can’t afford it. 

Your website will gladly welcome people who meet your requirements. Your purpose is to identify those requirements and adjust to them. It concerns everything we are going to discuss. 

Identifying your target audience and providing people with the content they were looking for will give your website more of a chance to be found and remembered. 

There are several ways to work with an audience:

1. Identify who already visits your website (for currently operating websites). 

The best way to find out who you work for is to analyze people who are already your clients. 

There are non-tool methods like: surveys on the website and – you can ask some questions about their education, occupation, hobbies, age, gender and a lot of other things during the signup process.

Why is every detail so important?

With this type of data, you can attract similar groups of people using special methods that will resonate with the audience better than general ones. 

For instance, you can bring their attention via specific phrases, colors, website design, advertisements and other things. If these features will be adjusted to your target audience’s needs, they will come to your website with greater desire. 

The best and fastest way is to use tools. The most popular one is Google Analytics. It is a free tool from Google which will show you a detailed report on your current audience. This will provide data like age, gender, and interests. The field of data available in this service is enormous. You will get to know where your users live, when they come and how much time they spend on your website. 

You’ll create a full-scale portrait of your audience. 

WebCEO integrates with Google Analytics. If you need an all-in-one SEO platform to keep track of your audience and analyze it without switching between different tools, use WebCEO’s Google Analytics Module:

2. Identify your potential customers (for startups). 

If you want to identify your future audience:

• create a persona to see whom you will most likely deal with;

A persona is a model of your future audience. It is presented as one person or a group of people with a set of common characteristics intrinsic to your potential clients. A persona is helpful if you will conduct a marketing campaign, design a product or a website. 

 The whole impression of personas changes day by day. Before starting to create one, make sure you know how to build an accurate portrait of your intended audience.

• analyze the audience of your competitors (how to identify them you will find out later): take into account their social media and interaction with customers, the feedback on their website and the general style of presenting and promoting their goods;

• conduct surveys on other platforms, like YouTube, where you can get answers from a lot of people. 

Spotlight: COMPETITORS

[this step is not required to be performed right away; however, it will ease your life further]

Admire your competitors. Even if you hate them, start liking them because they are the biggest and richest sources of information. Your competitors’ success is the best example of how to work. Analyze them carefully and show some respect. 

WHAT ARE WAYS TO IDENTIFY COMPETITORS?

The following methods are prescribed to be performed manually:

• Identify your niche down to the narrowest field. 

Here’s an example: information technology is an enormous niche with hundreds of branches. You can’t take everyone who performs here as your competitor. Take a narrow field you perform in: if you are a small software company, take into consideration only similar companies that work with or create the same type of product as you do. These are your competitors. 

Analyze their keywords and then work on your website. We can’t deny that eventually you will start growing, your company will become more authoritative, but from the very first days of your company’s existence you can’t compete with big corporations.  

• Make yourself a customer. 

Not literally. Behave as a customer who wants to learn about products you are going to sell. Type a query that is related to your business and analyze the SERP: who gets the first positions, how long those companies have been performing in your niche, why they are better, etc. You should look through the competitors’ statistics. 

• Go to Q&A websites and look for questions regarding your niche.

On such websites as Quora or Reddit, people often describe their experience with specific products, sometimes even with evidence. Be careful: there are a lot of PR-specialists there. However, it’s not a reason to give up. Read as many answers as you can and analyze the situation. Even if you have only marketing specialists’ answers, this will be a great opportunity to learn how to handle marketing and what your competitors’ strong sides are.  

Once you’ve done a manual check of competitors, SEO tools will help you accomplish even more:

• The WebCEO Rank Tracking and Competitors Metrics Tools. In seconds WebCEO will show you a list of your most dangerous competitors with detailed data on their rankings. Then the Competitor Backlink Spy can show, a few seconds later, which webpages are backlinking to more than one of your competitors!

Spotlight: KEYWORD RESEARCH

In-house SEO comprises multiple tasks. Unfortunately, you can’t avoid any. 

One of the hardest tasks is keyword research and optimization: with proper keyword selection you are halfway to be seen on SERPs. 

Keywords are words or phrases a webmaster uses while creating content on a specific topic. These are relevant to searchers’ queries so that people could find your content easily.

There are short tail keywords (1-2 words) and long tail keywords (>2 words). Long tail keywords are better: these are more topic oriented.

Without keyword optimization, you are very unlikely to appear on SERPs for a specific query, even if your content satisfies readers’ needs. 

SEO TIP:

1. Choose a niche you are going to perform in;
2. Create a list of keywords that are most relevant to your niche and are possible queries of your potential customers;
3. Create high quality content with keywords that are relevant to your niche and topic specifically and place them on a website;
4. Place keywords where they are required: titles, headings, sub-headings, visual media, alt text, URLs and other. 
5. Edit and publish your material.

Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. will take the rest under their control: once a user has typed a query, a search engine will start its work and present thousands of results for a searcher. It will look for relevant information by analyzing keywords placed on websites. 

It’s important to remember that Google doesn’t pay attention to keywords only. It also analyzes each aspect of a website’s performance, including technical factors, and chooses the best options based on the general picture. 

If your content and “reputation” are top-notch for a specific query, then you are most likely to be amidst the chosen ones:  

Google does a great job constantly updating its search algorithm, so be careful and prepare your team for days of hard work! By the way, coffee and donuts will be of the greatest assistance for you!

HOW DO I FIND HIGH VALUE KEYWORDS?

Online SEO tools such as the WebCEO Keyword Research Tool will help find the most successful and up-to-date keywords and phrases for you to use in your tags and content. Be sure to use localized words such as place names to attract as many readers as possible at a local level as well. 

You will get extended data on important metrics for evaluating keywords’ chances to succeed, such as global KEI, number of global searches, average CPC, bid competition, and search trends. 

There are a lot of other useful SEO tools that are simple to handle, free, or low-cost. We’ll bring such tools as Google Keyword Planner (Google Ads), Keywords Everywhere, Ubersuggest, and AnswerThePublic to your attention. These services are well done and will help you a lot during the process of keyword research, analysis and selection.

WHAT SHOULD YOU REMEMBER ABOUT WORKING WITH KEYWORDS?

• No keyword stuffing! 

 Keyword stuffing is an excessive number of keywords on a website’s page. An average quantity of keywords is ~1-3%.   

• Use keywords that are relevant to your topic!

No “pasta and pizza” if your niche is “cleaning services on Mars”.

• Use mostly long tail keywords: these work better because they specify a searcher’s intent:

Use “coffee and donuts nearby” instead of single “coffee” or “donuts”.

Tools to use for SEO Research and Analysis: 

Google Analytics will help you analyze your audience and traffic. 

Google Keyword Planner will help you find keywords for free along with the advertisement details on them.

WebCEO Set:

The Keyword Research Tool will help you find the most valuable keywords for your content with a full metric profile. 

The Rank Tracking Tool – the “Dangerous Competitors” tab specifically – will help you identify your most hazardous competitors and use information on them, such as the backlinks they share with other competitors, to conquer your niche.  

WebCEO’s Google Analytics Module will help analyze traffic for those who don’t want to go through thousands of tabs and prefer to work with an all-in-one SEO platform. 

CONCLUSION OF THE FIRST CHAPTER

Today we have tried to briefly consider what awaits you in research and analysis. These important factors and tasks will help you complete other SEO procedures. These are only the first steps in a lot of work. Stay tuned for further action!

The second chapter will be uploaded soon!

The post DIY SEO Guide for Beginners: How to Start the Process of Website Performance Optimization? Part I appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.